For those of you not in the know, a shield is a printed circuit board that physically latches onto your microcontroller to extend its core functions. There are a tonne on the market today so we wanted to highlight some of their features to make your shopping trip as simple as possible. Whether you want your Touch Board to be WIFI connected or turn a light on and off, just download the guide below and get clued up on which shield would suit you and your project the best. We’ve featured awesome shields from our friends over at Arduino, Adafruit, Ciseco and Sparkfun.
Bare Conductive Touch Board: Turn your paintings into touch sensors. Say what? Yes! And that’s only some of the amazing things this Bare Conducitve Touch Board can do. This board is designed to be integrated with the Bare Conductive Paint, though you can use many other conductive tools (it has 12 electrodes which can have any conductive material connected to it). But if you can paint your own, why would you use anything else?
The pre-programmed Touch Board is Arduino-at-Heart, so your Arduino shields and code will work seemlessly with it as if it were an Arduino Leonardo. It can also play music off an SD card — you could even paint a piano and turn your Touch Board into a synthesizer! Take advantage of it’s LiPo battery charger you can make any of your projects mobile.
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Stop breadboarding and soldering – start making immediately! Adafruit’s Circuit Playground is jam-packed with LEDs, sensors, buttons, alligator clip pads and more. Build projects with Circuit Playground in a few minutes with the drag-and-drop MakeCode programming site, learn computer science using the CS Discoveries class on code.org, jump into CircuitPython to learn Python and hardware together, TinyGO, or even use the Arduino IDE. Circuit Playground Express is the newest and best Circuit Playground board, with support for CircuitPython, MakeCode, and Arduino. It has a powerful processor, 10 NeoPixels, mini speaker, InfraRed receive and transmit, two buttons, a switch, 14 alligator clip pads, and lots of sensors: capacitive touch, IR proximity, temperature, light, motion and sound. A whole wide world of electronics and coding is waiting for you, and it fits in the palm of your hand.
Have an amazing project to share? The Electronics Show and Tell is every Wednesday at 7:30pm ET! To join, head over to YouTube and check out the show’s live chat and our Discord!
